


Dawn of a New World: Holiday-themed DLC

by tsukara



Category: Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:27:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsukara/pseuds/tsukara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ready Player One: The Holiday Special! And like any good, classic holiday special, it has friends, food, family, other holiday specials, and even a little bit of drama, for good measure. No Bea Arthur though. Sorry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dawn of a New World: Holiday-themed DLC

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tetracontakaidigon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tetracontakaidigon/gifts).



"The best Christmas present the universe ever got me was OASIS. Well. Maybe the second best."

\--

Wade wrote his story, the story of the Egg Hunt, and the story of how the four of us became some of the most important people in the world.

Of course, it was kind of Wade's story. Understandable enough, given that he was the one telling it, but nowhere near complete. So that's what Aech, Shoto, and I, Art3mis, have set out to undertake, along with a little help from Perzival, and some special guests along the way.

Such an undertaking would take a long time, especially with three stories to tell, instead of just the one. So think of this as the first installment. Our story. Ready Player One--the Holiday Special.

\--

They decided to spend their first real holiday season together. Wade, Art3mis, Aech, Shoto and, of course, Og. A curation of Christmas specials and a fake tree with actual ornaments. The tree was Ogden Morrow's. He confided to Wade that he hadn't brought it out in years, not since Kira passed away. The condition that he gave to them all was that they all had to contribute something to it, even something as small as an ornament.

Everything on the tree had a story behind it. That story was wasn't always explicated but it was clearly there. Samantha contributed an ornament that her grandmother had painted, a flittery, swirly thing that was gaudy and endearingly ugly. Shoto decided that traditional wishing board was a nice way of combining two traditions, with his messy scrawl in Japanese left untranslated. Aech's was a small pine tree air freshener that had long ago lost its scent, but somewhere along the way had gained glitter, glued-on tinsel, and a tiny star at the top. Wade had lost almost everything in the explosion and the move, and so his contribution was less historical, though still personal, a glass egg-shape ornament with a tiny scene painted inside, depicting knights at feast.

They all went on the tree, a local Doug fir, placed in a pot with a certain kind of soil that, Og explained, was engineered to maximize crop efficiency and minimize resource usage, all to keep the tree alive until it could be replanted in the yard at the end of the season (which gave Art3mis some great ideas for the new year). And there they sat, among the felt nativity, and the ceramic ornaments of '80s computer complete with mice, and tiny porcelein teapots, and looked right at home.

\--

Helen remembered her first Christmas in her RV. The space of her own, finally, to fill with her own traditions, her own decorations and symbols, to celebrate or not as she saw fit. There was definitely a sense of power in this, a realization almost as strange as the first time she had managed to get away with something her mother pointed out that typically only white men would get away with.

The shadow of her mother fell long, that first Christmas, everything Helen did was over-analyzed and held up against what she and her mother used to share. Calling it Christmas, a tiny little rebellion, but rebellion all the same, since her mother had always called it Giftmas. So to put up a string of LED lights behind the driver's seat and play actual christmas specials like Frosty and Charlie Brown was yet another form of rebellion. She’d only partake in the rebellions she actually enjoyed, she decided, after listening to a few 'Christmasy' tracks and deciding that they were probably not her cup of tea. 

A tree was the finishing touch, she decided. But a real tree would just be silly, and a fake one would take power from the batteries she wasn’t sure she wanted to spare. She had stumbled across the air freshener and purchased it, hanging it immediately from the rearview mirror. After that, a tree went up every December 1st, garnering decorations over the season, retired at the end of the season, but not thrown out. She had a small box of Christmas decorations, and they were all still there, memories of past Christmases, collected.

\--

It hadn't been very easy to get everyone in one place, even that first year. Every year after it seemed to get hard, but even more important, so they had managed it. Og had extended an invitation to host all of them, for as long as any of them needed to stay. He had started out as an interested party, and nothing more, and somewhere along the line, had become something of a friend to them all.

They all spent significant portions of it offline, in reality. They watched Christmas specials, and discussed the interesting fact that so many of them were in fact from before the 1980s proper, but had never really gone away. Frosty and Rudolph, Charlie and the Heat Miser. They mirrored them on their channels, but spent most of the time eating the spicy brown sugar popcorn that Aech had provided the recipe for and which had proved addicting, and drinking cocoa, cider, and tea.

They also spent parts of it talking, catching up on their plans, the ongoing saga of the lawyers and Sorrento and their personal lives as well. It hadn't been that long since they had seen each other in person, and they saw each other just about every day when they logged on. But all of them wanted to honor Halliday's last idea, and that was ok, with a whole chosen family around them.

\--

Few people knew that Samantha spent almost all of Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve AFK, more or less. Art3mis would log on, do what she thought of as her digital chores, and then spend the rest of the day with her family. They were small, tight-knit, just Samantha and her parents Her parents had been relatively insulated from the great crash, given that both of her parents had worked in the tech industry before the oil crisis, and could afford to keep working in it after. They owned their small house on the outer edges of Vancouver, and Canada had fared better, overall, for a while, though no one escaped the conseequences of the crash.

When she was small though, Samantha had been relatively isolated from all of that. Her mother had had the bigger paycheck and more secure job of her two parents, so her father had quit his full-time job when Samantha had gotten old enough. He still did some free-lancing work along with the chores, enough to make sure that mom was almost always able to come home for dinner, even on the busiest of weeks.

Especially for Christmas. Christmas was a family holiday, held sacred in their household unto itself. They would put up the tree together, a nice fake that looked a little shabbier and more well-loved every year, string the lights, reminisce over each ornament as it was placed. Some years they even had a small party for their friends in the neighborhood. There was a period of several years where Samantha had disappeared as soon as was permissible, wanting to get back to being Art3mis for many reasons, not the least of which was a lack of stupid, tasteless comments on everything from her weight to her lack of a boyfriend from adults who hadn't the first clue over what was really going on. Over the years she had gained confidence and lost fucks to give about what her parents' friends thought of her, which was wonderfully liberating and made the party more bearable, even if she was always happy to get back to the virtual world and her virtual self.

But spending time with family on Christmas was sacred. Which was why she had asked them to come down to Oregon, at least for a little while. Both her parents were able to spend almost all of Christmas Eve at the house. Wade had been so nervous that Samantha was pretty sure he was going to puke until she pointed out that he had won the Egg, he was a decent guy, and neither of her parents were big fans of weaponry or threats. All in all, things went far better than expected, for which Samantha was exceedingly grateful. Not least of which because it allowed her to stop worrying about it, and just enjoy the time with her folks, her friends, and her boyfriend.

\--

Before his mom had drifted off, she had instilled in him the importance of holidays. Not as 'holy days', as such, as that sort of thing didn't matter much to her, but days when a family, as small as it was, would be together to celebrate each other. Birthdays. New Year's. Christmas. Even the Fourth of July, as an excuse for a whatever special food they had any hopes of scrounging up. He'd even gone through a short period of time where he'd made a dedicated study of Halliday's own holiday traditions. Earth Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving. The holiday specials. Halliday hadn't cared about many of them, but they were a part of the zeitgeist. Even the Star Wars Holiday Special which was probably part of the canon, sure, but that certainly didn't make it good.

He and his mother had kept their own, small traditions. With her gone, his aunt seemingly had no sense of time beyond when food vouchers were available and when the sun was up, so they laid by the wayside for a long time all those things they had built up, the little layers that seemed like nothing until they weren't there anymore.

Mrs. Gilmore had been the most religious person he had known, attending church no less than three times between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, always being sure to invite Wade to share a little time with her between those though. He had always made sure to bring her whatever he could get his hands on food-wise in return, and would put up with the cats for a little while, until her next service started. She invited him to stay, of course, but he always declined.

She had gone up with stack, of course, but he still remembered her with some fondness the Christmas after the hunt, and said a toast to her at dinner.

\--

It was Aech that broached the idea of significant others, attending physically or virtually. This wasn't really an issue for Wade and Samantha, though seeing them in the same place at the same time was rare, given all of the work both of them were doing trying to fix the world in different ways.

Aech's girlfriend was skittish about travel, always had been, especially road travel, and while she was not exactly scared of air-travel, she simply had no experience with it. The last thing Aech wanted to do was stress her, too. Besides, Cecilia had never really done Christmas before as anything more than a tradition that existed. Her family had never bothered with a tree, but she had always received her red envelopes for the new year instead. It was decided by both Cecilia and Helen that they would have the equivalent of a private chat room, giving Cecilia something like the feeling with her haptic rig that she was there with everyone instead of in a tiny room in San Diego, but not overwhelmingly so. It was a compromise that worked out for everyone.

It was Shoto that surprised everyone by showing up with his new girlfriend in reality, a petite half-Japanese, half-white British woman a year or so older than him. She was significantly less shy than Shoto himself, an artist and a good one at that, a good go-between to bridge Shoto's quietness and the rest of them. She was not as geeky, only knew that the Egg Hunt had been a thing due to the huge thing it had been for OASIS as a whole, and thus the world. She had known Daito, was the daughter of one of his mother's friends, and after everything had come to light after the last gate, had gotten to know Shoto as well.

\--

Shoto was aware of the American traditions of gift-giving and family and all of that because yes, it was a part of the era that he had spent five years of his life gathering all of the knowledge that he could on. But Christmas in Japan was a time for couples, a romantic time, and though he had not spent much time out of the apartment, even after the hunt had ended, it was still very much a cultural concept of which he was aware.

As a shut-in, things were a little different. He had tried dating over OASIS before, but nothing had ever seemed to click. Too stoic, too reserved, they thought him, and he thought his potential partners uninteresting, especially compared to virtual ones. It had never been a problem. It still wasn't, as far as he was concerned. He knew when Christmas came due to the influx of holiday-themed art on Pixiv and the other sites, but other than that, he ignored it.

May blew into his life while he was mourning Daito and getting used to the idea of a world without the hunt. She was compassionate. She had just lost a friend herself, if not a brother like he had. She was understanding, bright, shining, and more beautiful than he thought he'd see without the alteration of software. May hadn't wanted to date him, because she was busy studying art, because she had no experience with dating, because he was a shut-in. He had done his best, asking for advice from Wade and Helen about what women found appealing, rebuilding a life a little at a time.

And on the first bloom of cherry blossoms in Tokyo, when she had asked him out for a coffee, and the neon shone bright, she agreed, finally, to try it out. She hadn't left since that point. She was his spring. He was her restful winter. They worked well together, despite their differences. They simply worked.

\--

So there was popcorn and cartoons and toasts to those there and gone. And there were a few important conversations along the way, because as much as holidays are a time for family, one cannot get away from business totally. Especially when your business is saving and protecting the world, real and virtual.

"I have something to tell you all," Wade said with all of the ominousness of any other 'we need to talk' proclamation. Dire, that was the word, I thought. All eyes in the room were turned to him, even Ogden's, with varying degrees of curiosity, confusion, and apprehension. "When I got the Egg, when Halliday talked to me, there wasn't just the money."

"And the unlimited power," Aech put in dryly with her Cheshire grin.

But Wade didn't really laugh other than a half grin. "Yeah, well, that too... but more than you know."

It was just us five, in the kitchen, a break between movies, getting late, the rain outside hissing softly against the window. The ones who had worked to find and win the egg. It must have been important, for him to insist on this particular set of people. "Along with the money and the power to do wahtever I want..." He took a deep breath. "There's an Off Button. A killswitch for OASIS as a whole."

This pronouncement coming from anyone else about anything else would be ridiculous. Still, the silence in the kitchen was profound. Apparently even Ogden was surprised to hear of the existence of such a thing. Halliday had spent so many years on the program, to put in a mechanism to destroy it entirely at some point--and knowing Halliday, it would be a total wipe, impossible to recover. He was that good at what he did.

Shoto was the first to react, with a polite murmur of, "That is certainly interesting. I thank you for making us aware of it."

That was true, I thought. If Halliday had wanted the rest of us to know, he wouldn't have cut off communications during the final gate, and only re-enbled them after a certain point. I had always had the feeling that that silence had been hiding something, but now I knew what.

It was Ogden that asked the question with the obvious answer. "Do you plan on using it?"

Wade didn't give the obvious answer though, shaking his head and then saying, surprisingly, "No, not just yet."

That caught the rest of us by surprise, and Helen and I both broke out into a rash of questions, talking over each other to wring out of him just what he meant by that. He held up his hands, and we quieted with matching glares. "It was something else Halliday said. It's not important. What is important? Is that I wanted you to all know about it, and to know that I will never press it without your go-ahead." He met each of our eyes, holding mine the longest.

I couldn't take it anymore. These were other conversations we needed to have, but not with an audience, even one as select as this. "Please excuse me," I said frostily, my feet carrying me to the glassed-in sun room, filled with wintering plants and the tapping of rain on glass. I didn't even notice if Wade was following me, but he appeared a few minutes later.

He didn't immediately start talking, leaning against the door instead. I ignored him for a few minutes, instead examining the rosemary bush that stayed in its large, terra-cotta pot in the wintertime. Finally, I sighed and leaned against one of the supporting pillars, mimicing his pose. "Well?" I asked after a few more seconds of silence.

"What are you scared of?" There would have been a time where Wade Watts would never have been that straight-forward or to the point. There was also a time when I would have shut him down with a denial and brush it, and him, off.

Not these days though. I wasn't totally unaffected, to be fair. It took a few seconds to smooth my internal hackles, more or less, at the pinpoint question. "You could take away everything we, and so many other people, have worked on and for and fought for, in a moment of pique, and you think I shouldn't be scared?" Ah, sarcasm, my old friend.

He looked the tiniest bit exasperated, but approached anyway. I let him get closer, but circled around the rosemary, putting the bush between the two of us. "I already told you, I won't do anything with it until you give me the ok. All of you."

"You say that now, Wade, but what happens if-- if something happens?" Too vague. I groped for better. "If I leave you, for whatever reason? What happens if one of us dies, not only in OASIS, but for real? Do we go down to four votes to end the world?"

Apparently though, he had been considering these very questions. It was more forethought than I had expected. We were all so busy with out projects in the world and out of it, that I hadn't noticed how much he really had grown up, since the first time I had run into him on Ludus. "No matter what, I want to be your friend. Even if we break up--I really don't want to, by the way--I still want to be your friend, I hope."

Out of the two of us, I had only a slight advantage on him in the dating department, though it was much more disasterous than one would have hope for. "Does that ever work?"

"I think it can. If you work at it. If you're willing." He shook his head, plopping down on the rim of the terracotta pot, ignoring the branches poking around his stubbly head. "I think I might always love you, but part of that is working to be friends, if it doesn't work out, I think. I learned the lesson that Halliday did too late."

He ran a hand over his peach-fuzz hair, blowing out a sigh as he thought. "You're my sun, my moon, my oasis--" He stopped, considered for a moment, and then with the slightest of nods he probably didn't even realize he'd done, he repeated, "My Oasis."

I stared, weighed his words, and sighed, perching myself next to him on the pot's edge. "You idiot. You realize all of this would still definitely make it hard if we were to ever break up, right?"

Wade laughed, ducking his head down a little lower to ineffectually hide his grin. "I know, I know." Then he turned serious again, a frown stealing its way across his face. "The button though. I promise."

I considered him solemnly, thinking of that large red button and everything it meant, from planets to long-dead authors and long-beloved franchises, to the smaller, more personal spaces carved out into cyberspace, including a wood-paneled basement-like chat room, and nodded. "I know."

"Good."

May was eventually sent to fetch us from the swiftly-cooling sunroom, letting us know that there was a simulated fire in the fireplace, and that we were choosing movies and if we did not hurry, our votes would be forfeit for the first round. Kissing could wait. We were going to spend time with our chosen family.

"Good," Wade answered. "Good."

\--

Even now, we all get together in the real world, if at all possible, for the holidays. Once a year, even through the barriers of geography, responsibilities, and life changes, we try and make it, even if it's only virtually. There have been marriages, break-ups, births and deaths, and we still ask ourselves every year if this is when we press the button. So far, the answer has been 'not yet', but maybe someday.

We're working on a reality worth living in. We're not there yet, but maybe someday. Someday soon.

**Author's Note:**

> The soundtrack for this fic included many, many things I don't wish to inflict on anyone past the holiday season, especially the Chipmunks, oh god. Suffice it to save it was heavy on the '80s and heavy on the cheesy holiday music. Inspirations include every special holiday episode, film, or special, even the Star Wars Holiday Special (sadly, no Life Day reference snuck in there, alas).
> 
> A wonderful thank you to my beta (the nit-pickiest ♥) and my commiserators (who gave me several other fic ideas to help me procrastinate... ack!), and to you, for participating!
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope your new year is full of light. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
